Semantically-based 2.5D texture printing

Relief printing, also known as 2.5D printing, is capable of representing texture in a more appealing way to the human observer due to the fact that it can reproduce the tactile details and structures of a texture. This paper describes a novel method to reproduce a given textured area of an image based on the semantic information linked to that area. A texture detector is trained offline with a non-parametric test in order to produce a printing mask which labels pixels more likely to belong to a specific texture-related semantic concept. The height map needed to print pixels in relief is calculated automatically from the printing mask and the gray-scale version of the original image.